Choosing a payment solution for a platform is not the same exercise as choosing one for a shop. A shop asks what the rate is and how fast money arrives. A platform has to ask who onboards the sellers, who holds the balances, who is liable when an order fails, and what happens on the day a seller turns out to be a problem.
Most providers answer the first question well and the rest vaguely. The list below is what separates a solution built for platforms from a shop product with a marketplace label on the pricing page.
Seller onboarding: the part that decides your workload
Every seller has to be identified before they receive money. The question is who does that work and how much of it lands on your support team.
Ask whether onboarding runs through an API you can embed in your own seller signup, or whether sellers get redirected to a form they will not recognise. Ask how long approval takes and what share gets rejected. Ask what happens to a seller stuck in review — can they list items but not receive payouts, or is everything frozen? A platform that cannot onboard sellers in a day loses them to one that can.
Our side of this sits with the merchant account setup, and the account itself opens from 5 days once documents are complete.
Money movement you can control
The solution has to do three things without manual work: split an incoming payment, hold a share until you release it, and pay sellers on a schedule you define. If any of the three needs a spreadsheet, you will be doing that spreadsheet every week for as long as the platform exists.
Specifically, check whether the commission can be a percentage, a fixed amount or both at once, since most platforms eventually need both. Check whether you can hold funds per order rather than per seller, because disputes attach to orders. And check whether a payout can be reversed before it lands, which you will want the first time a fraudulent order slips through. How this works technically is described under processing.
Reporting that survives an audit
Platforms outgrow their own bookkeeping faster than shops do, because every euro that passes through belongs to someone else for part of its journey. Before signing, ask to see a real settlement report rather than a screenshot.
It should let you answer three questions without a developer: what did a given seller earn last month, which orders make up a given payout, and where is the money that has not been paid out yet. If the report cannot do that, your finance team will rebuild it in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet will be wrong by quarter three.
Where seller balances wait between collection and payout matters too. A dedicated business IBAN keeps that money separable from your own revenue, which makes the audit conversation short.
What happens when a seller goes bad
This is the scenario nobody demos, and the one that costs the most. A seller takes orders, does not ship, disappears. The buyers dispute. The money has already been paid out.
Ask directly: can you suspend a seller’s payouts instantly, or does it take a support ticket? Can you recover a chargeback loss from their future earnings automatically? Do you get an alert when one seller’s dispute rate rises, or do you find out from the acquirer? A solution that answers these three well is worth paying more for, because the alternative is paying for the losses yourself.
Questions about the commercial side
Platform pricing has more moving parts than shop pricing. Beyond the processing rate, which starts from 1.8% for middle-risk platforms, there is usually a fee per payout, sometimes a fee per onboarded seller, and occasionally a monthly platform fee. A model with cheap processing and expensive payouts suits a platform with large orders and few sellers, and ruins one with the opposite shape.
Take your real numbers — orders per month, average order, sellers, payout frequency — and price the whole thing rather than the headline. The structure is on our pricing page.
What to test during a pilot
Demos are built to succeed, so the useful comparison happens on your own data. Ask for a sandbox and run four scenarios through it before signing: a normal order with a split, a refund after the seller was paid, a dispute on a delivered order, and a seller who fails verification halfway.
Those four cover the paths your support team will actually walk. The refund after payout is the one that surprises people most, because the money has to come from somewhere, and whether the platform or the seller carries it is a configuration choice rather than a law of nature.
While testing, look at how payouts appear from the seller’s side, since that screen is what your sellers judge you by.
Common questions are collected in our FAQ.
A short checklist
- Seller onboarding through your own interface, not a redirect.
- Split, hold and payout without manual steps.
- Commission as percentage, fixed or both.
- Payout suspension and loss recovery per seller.
- Settlement reports that map payouts to orders.
- Dispute rate visible per seller, not only per platform.
If a provider ticks all six, the integration work is the easy part. If it ticks four, you will build the other two yourself, and that is a cost worth knowing before the contract rather than after. The mechanics of the money flow itself we covered separately in the piece on business merchant accounts.
Connection from 5 days. Fees from 1.8% — transparent terms, no hidden charges. Leave a request or book a consultation and we will put together the right setup for your niche and risk profile.